Promise at Dawn

  I think that this was the first time in the history of the R.A.F. that a blind pilot succeeded in making a safe landing. The official R.A.F. account of the incident merely said that “during the landing the pilot managed to hold his eyes open with the fingers of one hand, in spite of the splinters of plexiglas with which the lids were riddled.” This exploit was marked by the immediate award of the British Distinguished Flying Cross to Arnaud Langer. He was to recover his sight completely: the lids had been nailed against the eyeballs by the fragments of plexiglas, but the optic nerve had not been touched. After the war he became an air transport pilot. In June, 1955, he was coming in to land at Fort-Lamy a few seconds ahead of a tropical tornado; witnesses saw a bolt of lightning strike like a fist from the black clouds behind him, and hit the pilot in his cockpit. Arnaud Langer was killed instantaneously. It took this foul blow for fate to catch up with him.

  I was sent to the hospital, where my injury was diagnosed as “perforation of the abdomen.” But no essential organ was involved, and the wound healed very quickly. What was much more annoying was that, in the course of their investigations, the doctors discovered the generally poor state of my insides, and they declared me unfit for further flying duty. But this was only the R.A.F. speaking and we, the Free French, had a less puritanical approach to our hidden organs, and I was soon back with the Lorraine Squadron, happily bombing the Rommel line along the coast, to open the way for the Allied landing in Normandy.

  It was then that the happiest moment of my life occurred, and to this day, and to my last, it will remain the happiest.

  A few days earlier I had been summoned, with Arnaud Langer, to the B.B.C., where we were interviewed at length about our sortie. Knowing the requirements of propaganda and how eager the French public was for news of its airmen, I did not attach much importance to it, but I was a little surprised to see an article on the subject in the next day’s Evening Standard.

  I returned to the Hartford Bridge base, and was in the mess when an orderly handed me a telegram. I glanced at the signature: Charles de Gaulle.

  I had just been awarded the Cross of the Liberation.

  I don’t know whether there is anybody today who realizes what that green and black ribbon meant to us. Apart from the very best of our dead comrades, only a very few among the living had received it. I am not sure whether the total of those, alive or dead, who were so honored amounts now to more than six hundred. From questions occasionally put to me by Frenchmen I realize how few of them know what the Cross of the Liberation is and what its ribbon stands for. I am glad that this should be so. Now that almost everything has been either forgotten or betrayed, it is good that ignorance should preserve and shelter our memories, our fidelity and our comradeship. We do not ask anything from the living and our pride is with the dead.

  I moved in a sort of daze, shaking the friendly hands around me, and it is difficult to convey my feelings, my exaltation, my gratitude and my love. Even today I feel the need to apologize, to justify myself. When I say that I can see nothing in my poor efforts that could warrant such an honor, I know that this sounds merely like the usual display of false modesty. And yet it should be evident to anyone, if I have in the least succeeded in summoning her, in making her arise alive from these pages, that all I had been able to do was as nothing compared to what my mother expected of me, compared to all she had taught and told me about my country.

  Some months later, the Cross of the Liberation was pinned to my tunic under the Arc de Triomphe by General de Gaulle and the episode of Avord thus became closed forever.

  Needless to say I lost no time in sending a telegram to Switzerland so that my mother should learn the news. I also wrote to a member of the British Embassy staff in Portugal asking him to forward a cautiously worded letter to Nice at the first opportunity. I could go home at last. My book had given my mother some spark of that artistic fame she had dreamed of all her life and I was going to present to her the greatest of all French military honors, which she had so well deserved.

  The Allied landings had just taken place. The war would soon be over. I could sense in the letters reaching me from Nice a feeling of joy and serenity as though my mother knew at last that the goal was in sight. There was about them an especial note of tenderness and also of apology for which I could not altogether account. “My beloved son, we have been separated now for many years and I hope that you have grown accustomed to my absence since, after all, I am not on this earth forever. Remember that I have never had a shadow of doubt about you. I do hope that when you come back and understand everything, you will forgive me. I could not have acted otherwise.” What was it she had done that needed my forgiveness? The idiotic idea suddenly came to me that she had perhaps remarried. But at sixty-one it seemed highly improbable. I felt behind her words a tender irony, I could almost hear her sniff with satisfaction and catch on her face that guiltily sly look which she always assumed whenever she had behaved badly and given way to one of her eccentricities. She had already given me so much trouble! In almost all her hastily scribbled, brief notes, there was now that hint of embarrassment and apology which made me feel that, once again, she must have done something really awful. But what could it be? “All that I’ve done I’ve done only because you needed me. You must not be angry. I am very well. I am waiting for you.” I racked my brains, but to no purpose.

  CHAPTER 42

  I am very close now to the last word, and the nearer I come to the end, the greater becomes the temptation to throw my notebook away and let my head fall upon the sand. Last words are always the same and one would like, at least, to withdraw one’s voice from the chorus of the defeated. But I have only a few things to add, it is all part of the fight, and no one is going to say that I lacked courage.

  Paris was on the point of being liberated and I arranged to have myself parachuted into the south of France for liaison duties with the Resistance. I was in a hurry—my blood boiled with impatience, and nothing mattered to me now except getting back to her in time. At nights I was kept awake by the apprehension that, at the last moment, something might happen to her. And a quite unexpected turn of events was now providing a truly fairy-tale ending to our strange journey from the snows of Russia to the Mediterranean shore: I received an official letter from our Foreign Office suggesting that I apply for a permanent diplomatic appointment—as a First Secretary—in the French Diplomatic Service. What made this so odd was that I knew nobody at the Foreign Office nor, for that matter, in any non-military department: I quite literally did not know a single male civilian. I had never mentioned to anyone the ambitions which my mother had entertained for me. My European Education had enjoyed a considerable success in England, but that was not enough to explain this sudden offer of admission into the Diplomatic Service without an examination and, as the document proclaimed, “in recognition of exceptional services rendered to the cause of the Liberation.” For a long time I looked incredulously at the letter, turning it over and over in my hand. It was couched in terms which had none of that impersonal tone which is the hallmark of official correspondence; on the contrary, it breathed a sympathy, almost a personal friendliness, which deeply troubled me. This sensation of being known or, more precisely, being imagined was something quite new to me. It was one of those moments when I found it difficult not to feel that I had been brushed by a loving and smiling Providence, as if some serene and just Mediterranean, guardian of our age old human shore, was now presiding over the scales. My mother’s destiny was taking shape. But in the midst of my sunniest and most enthusiastic raptures there always remains a pinch of earthly salt, with its slightly bitter taste of experience and wariness, so that I look on miracles with a distrustful eye, and, behind the mask of Providence, I found no difficulty in detecting a somewhat guilty smile that I knew only too well. My mother had once again lent a hand, she had been up to her usual tricks. She had been busy behind the scenes, knocking at doors, singing my praises in influential quarters. I now had the explanation
of that embarrassed, somewhat sly and apologetic note which had faintly sounded in her last letters and had given me the impression that she was up to no good. She had been pulling strings, knowing perfectly well that this would make me angry.

  The Allied landings in the south of France cut short my parachuting plans. I arranged immediately for a “special mission order,” and my friend and commanding officer. General Corniglion-Molinier, found just the right imperative and epic tone, smacking of Ulysses’ return home from his travels. With the aid of the Americans—my written instructions carried the mysterious and sardonic note, so typical of the general’s wit: “Nature of Mission: Urgent”—I was taken in a succession of jeeps as far as Toulon. From there on, things became rather more complicated. The peremptory tone of the order, however, opened all roads to me, and I shall never forget the remark made to me, by Corniglion-Molinier with that faintly mocking seriousness of his, when he signed the document and I expressed my thanks:

  “But your mission is very important to all of us. It is very important, a victory. . . .”

  And the very air around me had an intoxicating taste of triumph. The sky seemed closer and more conciliatory, each olive tree was a friendly sign, and the Mediterranean was coming toward me, above the cypresses and the pines, above the barbed wire, the silenced guns, the overturned tanks, like an old nurse opening her arms. I had sent news to my mother of my imminent arrival in ten separate messages, which must have converged upon her from all sides only a few hours after the entry of the Allied troops into Nice. A message in code had even been transmitted to the Maquis, a week earlier. Captain Vanurien, who had been parachuted into the region a fortnight before the landings, offered to get into immediate touch with her and to let her know that I was on my way. My English buddies of the Buckmaster network had promised to keep an eye on her during the fighting. I had many friends and they understood. They knew perfectly well that what mattered was not her or me, but our old human companionship, our shoulder-to-shoulder struggle and progress in pursuit of justice and reason. There was in my heart a youthfulness, a confidence, a gratitude, a singing joy, which the antique sea, the oldest and most faithful of our witnesses, must have seen so often since the days when the first of her sons returned triumphant to her shore. With the green and black ribbon of the Liberation prominently displayed upon my chest, above the Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre and five or six other medals of which I had forgotten none, with the captain’s stripes on the shoulders of my black battle dress, my cap tilted over one eye and with a more than usually tough expression, owing to my facial paralysis, with my novel in its French and English editions in my shoulder bag, together with a bunch of press cuttings, and, in my pocket, the letter which would open the doors of the “Career,” with just enough lead in my body to give it some weight, intoxicated with hope, with youth, certainty and the Mediterranean, standing, at last, standing upright in the light, upon a blessed shore where no suffering, no sacrifice, no love was ever thrown idly to the winds, where everything counted, mattered, had meaning, was thought out and accomplished according to some golden rule of art—I was coming home, after having demonstrated that the world was an honorable place, after having given form and meaning to life and thrown a triumphant light over our destiny.

  Black-faced G.I.’s seated on stones, with grins so wide and glittering that they seemed to be lit from inside, as though their radiance shone from the heart, raised their automatic rifles in the air as we passed, and in their friendly laughter was all the joy and happiness of a promise kept:

  “Victory, man, victory!”

  We were taking possession of the world again and each smashed tank was like the carcass of a god brought low. Squatting Goumiers, with sharp-featured, yellowish faces under their turbans, were roasting an ox whole over a wood fire; among the uprooted vines, the tail of an airplane was planted like a broken sword and, between the olive trees and the cypresses, from the one-eyed blankness of cement blockhouses hung an occasional lifeless gun with its round and vacant stare of stupidity and defeat.

  Standing in the jeep, in this landscape where olives and vines and orange trees seemed to come running from all sides to greet me, where the wrecked trains, the blown bridges and the twisted, tangled strands of barbed wire were, like dead hatred, swept out of sight at each turn of the road, it was only after we had crossed the pontoons over the Var that all the laughing faces and the waving hands became blurred around me, that I no longer answered their friendly signs, but stood there, clinging to the windshield, my whole being resounding with the beating of my blood and every sense, every fiber in me prepared for the familiar sight, the street, the house, the gray silhouette waiting for me with open arms under the flags of victory.

  I should end my story here. I am not writing to cast a deeper shadow on the earth. It is painful for me to continue, and I will do so as rapidly as possible, quickly adding a few words, so that it may all be over and I may let my head fall back again on the sand, at the ocean’s edge, in the solitude of Big Sur, where I have come to bring my story to its end.

  At the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts there was no one to greet me. Those I questioned remembered vaguely having heard of a strange Russian lady who ran the place years ago but they had not met her. My friends were gone. My mother had died three years and six months earlier, a few weeks after my departure for England. But she had known that I was still a weakling then, and that I would never be able to stand on my own feet and fight as befits a Frenchman unless she were there to give me her support; and she had made her plans accordingly.

  During the last few days before her death, she had written nearly two hundred and fifty letters and sent them to her friend in Switzerland. I was not to know that she was no longer there to support me—the undated letters were to be forwarded to me at regular intervals—this was, no doubt, what she was scheming with so much love when I had caught that naïve and cunning expression in her eyes, when we parted for the last time at the Saint-Antoine clinic.

  And so I had gone on receiving from my mother the strength and the courage I so greatly needed to carry me through to the day of victory, when she had been dead for more than three and a half years. The umbilical cord had continued to function.

  It is over. The beach at Big Sur is empty, but when I raise my head I can see the seals on one of the rocks and, on the other, thousands of sea birds—cormorants, gulls, pelicans—and, sometimes, a spouting whale passes far out at sea, and while I lie thus motionless upon the wet sand, a vulture slowly begins to circle the sky above me, coming lower and lower.

  It is many years now since my fall took place, and it seems to me that it was here, among these rocks at Big Sur, that I fell, and that I have been lying here for an eternity, listening to the murmur of the ocean and striving to understand what it is trying to tell me.

  I was not beaten in a fair fight.

  My hair is turning gray, but that is a poor disguise and I have not really aged very much, though I must now be nearing my eighth year. I would not like anyone to think that I attach too much importance to all this. I flatly refuse to give my defeat a universal significance, and even though the torch was snatched from my hand, I still smile with hope and certitude when I think of the many hands ready to raise it once more, and to carry it further and further, until a new world will cast across the infinite its undying light. I believe in victory, and I draw no lesson from my end, no resignation; I have renounced only myself, and there is no great harm in that.

  I know now that I have been badly lacking in a sense of brotherhood. It is not right to love only one human being so much, even if it is your mother. My mistake had been to believe in individual victories. Now that “I” no longer exist, all has been given back to me. Men, peoples, all our legions have become my allies, I am unable to take sides in their quarrels and I remain, with my face raised, watchful and wary, at the foot of heaven, like a forgotten sentry. I still see myself in all living and ill-treated creatures, and am wholly unsuited for fratr
icidal battles.

  But, for the rest, take a good peek at the firmament, after I am dead: you will see, somewhere around Orion, the Pleiades or the Great Bear, another constellation, that of the human Cur, clinging with all his teeth to some celestial nose.

  And I can still be happy, as I am now, this evening, stretched on the sands of Big Sur, in the gray and misty dusk, with the distant barking of the seals reaching me from the rocks, and I have only to raise my hand to see the ocean. I listen attentively, and again I feel that I am just on the point of understanding what it is trying to confide in me, that I am going to break the code, at last, that the insistent, incessant murmur of the surf is striving, almost desperately, to deliver a message, to give me the explanation, the meaning, the key.